What We Know About Boys and School Shootings
Excerpts from the yearbook of one of the Columbine shooters
This is the first article in a two-part series about the intersections of masculinity and mass shootings. Read the first article: Misogyny, White Supremacy and the Blueprints for Mass Shootings.
Trigger warning: gun violence
Columbine, Colorado, on April 20, 1999. Two high school students committed the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history.
Since then, we’ve become all too familiar with gun violence in schools. Only the deadliest shootings still make the headlines: Virginia Tech. Sandy Hook. Parkland. Most recently, Uvalde, where nineteen elementary school students and two teachers were killed by a teenage shooter.
There is a major conversation to be had about gun control, particularly in the United States where the leading cause of death among children is guns. But if we’re going to truly reckon with this issue, we also need to talk about bullying, boys’ experiences with masculinity, and school culture.
Here’s what we know.
Bullying lays the foundation for school shootings.
In the aftermath of Columbine, the U.S. Secret Service started researching common threads among school shooters. They didn’t find a particular profile for the student attacker, although they did find that about 70% of the attackers had experienced bullying and harassment at the hands of their peers.
In a similar study in 2019, that number had risen to 80% and was identified as a primary motive.
On one hand, bullying offers a clear explanation for school violence, one that has resonated with the media and general public for over two decades. On the other hand, it’s misleading and distracting. Because nearly all bullied youth—and in particular queer, non-white and disabled youth who are the most vulnerable at school—never engage in mass shootings.
So if the most vulnerable to bullying are not doing the shooting, who is?
According to the research published over the last two decades, more than 90% of student attackers are male.
That matters.
Gun violence is intertwined with society’s messages about masculinity.
In 2020, Canada experienced its deadliest shooting in modern history. In the days following the shooting, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau asked the media to avoid mentioning the name of the perpetrator, saying, “Do not give him the gift of infamy.”
It was a measured response probably intended to diminish the likelihood of copycat attacks. The sensationalized news coverage that followed the Columbine massacre, by contrast, helped foster the Columbine effect, linking a chain of more than 50 related attacks in the two decades that followed.
Both of these responses, however, demonstrate the limited set of options within public discourse to respond to this kind of senseless violence. Trudeau turned to gun control, while Columbine was followed with a push for zero-tolerance anti-bullying policies.
Gun control matters. Bullying prevention is valuable. But these responses don’t effectively examine the links between masculinity and mass shootings.
Look no further than the perpetrator of the École Polytechnique massacre in 1989, who declared that he was “fighting feminism” before he pulled the trigger.
Yet newspaper headlines have repeatedly portrayed shooters from Columbine and École Polytechnique as ‘monsters.’ However, “by referring to them as ‘monsters,’” researcher Mia Consalvo points out, “a slippage occurs—monsters are not seen as gendered creatures.”
“Until masculinity and its different constructions are better explored in general society as well as in the news, we as news audiences and citizens will be blind to how these masculinities are linked—falsely and not—to damaging traits and behaviors. By ignoring these differentials, masculinity as a system will remain untouched, and opportunities for examining how boys and men might feel trapped in a losing system go unexplored. The events at Columbine High School and others like them demand better understandings of how masculinities are constructed, contested, and reaffirmed in American society.”
Sociologists Michael Kimmel and Matthew Mahler have found that in nearly all accounts of school shootings in the US, the male shooters reported having been specifically harassed for inadequate gender performance: “The profile that gradually emerges is that of white boys who have been targeted, bullied, beaten up, gay baited, and worse—virtually every single day of their lives. They were called every homophobic slur in the books, and then some. They were mercilessly ridiculed, threatened, attacked, and tortured.”
We’ve heard this from boys themselves.
“I am not insane,” a 16-year-old boy wrote in a note before he opened fire at his high school in 1997. “I am angry. This was not a cry for attention, it was not a cry for help. It was a scream in sheer agony.”
Photo by Zed Nelson of Columbine High School students gathering outside their school the day after the massacre, 1999
“Theirs are stories of ‘cultural marginalization’ based on criteria for adequate gender performance—specifically the enactment of codes of masculinity. And so they did what any self-respecting man would do in a situation like that—or so they thought. They retaliated.”
From an early age, boys learn that violence is not only acceptable, but admirable. Teenage boys are four times as likely as girls to think fighting is a form of conflict resolution. Almost half of all high school boys in Canada have experienced some form of physical assault. One in five have been threatened with a weapon.
To be clear, what has made school-based violence more deadly in the United States in recent history is access to firearms. But a culture of violence is at the heart of school shooters.
“It was not because they were deviants,” Kimmel explains, “but rather because they were over-conformists to a particular normative construction of masculinity, a construction that defines violence as a legitimate response to perceived humiliation.”
“The cultural script of committing violence against vulnerable others becomes a blueprint for boys to regain respectable masculinity.”
Delve deeper: We expand on this research in our online course, Making Sense of Senseless Violence.
School culture is part of the pattern of rampage shootings.
So it’s not just bullying, it’s boys’ experiences of gender-based harassment in particular, compounded by their immersion in a culture that normalizes and celebrates retaliation.
Boys are versed in the vocabulary of violence, but whether or not they choose to speak that language depends on their surroundings. Schools are a major author of that narrative.
As journalist Mark Ames wrote after the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007, it isn’t the schoolyard shooters who need to be profiled—they can’t be. It is the schools that need to be profiled.
We’ve seen this at schools like Columbine and Virginia Tech, where athletes and sports programs are privileged, and the teachers and administration invariably turn a blind eye to bullying and violence. Where school mental health services are missing because of a lack of funding. Where student hierarchies are maintained through relentless harassment.
I’ve seen this lead to other forms of physical violence in my hometown of Toronto: Devan Bracci-Selvey. Jack Meldrum. Jesse Clarke. Unchecked sexual violence across North America: Glen Ridge. Steubenville. Vanderbilt.
“It wasn’t just that Harris and Klebold—and other eventual rampage shooters—were bullied and harassed and intimidated every day,” writes Kimmel. “It was that the administration, teachers, and community colluded with it.”
So if we really want to face the roots of gun violence in our schools, we need to look in the mirror.
We need to collectively examine how we teach boys about masculinity, how we respond to the brutality of their peers, and how we influence the spaces they inhabit. And we need to do something about it.
Read more: Past Breaking the Boy Code article, The Thousand Cuts of Boyhood.
Every boy we worked with at the end of 2018 had heard the allegations of sexual assault at St. Michael’s College School. Iit would have been easier to write off the boys involved as bad or broken—monsters rather than young men. Instead, we started running sessions with students at our partner schools to help them explore the characteristics of hazing, locker room culture and codes of silence between guys.
When we brought it up in one particular lunch program, an eighth-grader raised his hand. “It’s not like we need to be fixed,” he interjected. “Nobody here would do anything like that.”
“I believe you,” I responded, “but I also believe that most of the boys at St. Mike’s would have said the same thing.” I thought for a moment. “Things that need to be fixed are things that are broken,” I said, then paused to look around the room.
“You’re not. You’re the best chance of stopping violence before it even happens.”
There’s a nuance there that isn’t possible in newspaper headlines, or in an unsafe learning environment. I knew him well enough to know what he was getting at. He knew me well enough to know I meant what I said. Because of that, I was able to have a conversation about masculinity and violence while remaining connected to the young people in the midst of it.
This is what it looks like to put anti-violence into practice, to help young people—boys and young men in particular—make sense of the root causes of violence, and their role in challenging it.
What came to the fore in Columbine in 1999 has become a pattern of violence that stems from the disconnection, aggrieved entitlement and rage rebellion of vulnerable boys and young men.
To change that, we need to look with our eyes wide open at the ways young people navigate the violent tenets of masculinity, and we need to empower boys themselves to become leaders of the change we so desperately need.